Since the 1930s, the Democrats' self-advertised stock in trade has been compassion, and no group of Americans more so than blacks have been on the receiving end of the Democrats’ benevolence. With completely, comprehensively disastrous results.

If statist Democrats aren’t stopped, Democratic benevolence promises for the rest of the country a lesser -- though still spirit-crippling -- version of the compassion that has blighted inner cities and utterly wasted the lives of many poor blacks. Democrats have commenced transforming America into ghetto-light.

That’s not to trivialize the devastation that poor black families and poor black communities have suffered for decades at the hands of liberals and their own black leadership, which has bought into liberalism and controls many big city political machines. (See George Gilder’s classic Wealth and Poverty, or Charles Murray’sLosing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980, for more on liberalism’s abundant contributions to poverty.) Nor does it overstate the case by arguing that ramped-up government meddling, control, and costs would significantly harm middle- and working-class communities across the nation.

Want a hint of what happens to middle- and working-class communities long on the receiving end of Democrats’ big government policies?

Travel the Northeast and the Midwestern rust-bucket states where Democratic governance is the rule rather than the exception, where liberalism has been the governing philosophy for decades. What will you find? More than your share of middle- and working-class communities, usually close to cities, that are ailing economically and were hurting for many years before the 2008 recession.

Communities on the way to ghetto-light don’t make the glossy covers of state promotional brochures. Go to some of these communities yourself -- in and around cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Newark. The streets are potholed, new construction is minimal (and often partially or fully subsidized by tax dollars), buildings are run-down or vacant, and there’s a noticeable enervation among the locals given that the entrepreneurial spirits and the ambitious young have moved away to seek their fortunes -- or just improve their lots -- in the Sunbelt.

Conservatives are convinced that Barack Obama and congressional liberals want to remake America in the image of the socialist democracies of Western Europe, with all the nanny state, cradle-to-grave trappings. To give the Democrats their due, that’s probably how they see America’s future: sort of one big hospice, where the nation’s decline and death as an economic and military power is buffered by gobs of government largess and soothed by the kindly touch of bureaucrats.

That’s what’s happening in Europe. The nanny states across the continent are attempting to make the decline and death of Europe easier for the dwindling masses (Europe’s birthrates are alarmingly below replacement rates). But the economic crises facing the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) may well spill over into the rest of Europe. And that doesn’t account for the larger global economic trials the world is facing and which will impact Europe. A resulting economic upheaval may preclude a cushioned landing in history’s dustbin for Europe’s socialist democracies.